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I've never bought into the invalid CC reason for a reversal either. Even if the merchant doesn't actually charge the card in real time, you can betcha that they get the approval on the card in real time. So that means that if the customer entered an invalid card number, an expired card, a card over the limit, etc a denial would be issued in real-time and the customer gets a different page via the shopping cart and never even reaches the receipt page where the tracking code is supposed to be. I'm a ver small merchant, relatively speaking, and even I get my authorizations in real-time.

I can buy the duplicate charge reason, in very limited quantities. I see this happen occassionally myself. The customer hits submit more than once or the gateway just belches and issues two authorizations off of one invoice number. But these are far and few themselves.

Merchants need to have some accountability for the reversal reasons. It seems that merchants reverse and just choose any reason that tickles their fancy at the moment. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]

I have to agree with you BLFH. No legitimate merchant has a shopping cart program or use manual verification that doesn't verify the card information. This is evident when you consider some one like Overstock processing millions of online orders monthly runs less than 1% fraud attempts. My small niche' merchant www.suspenders.com uses a manual approval technique for all major credit cards to verify balance and proper shipping addresses. Their cart screens out false card numbers and stolen cards and bogus billing addresses at a total expense of 20.00 per month.

They have processed over 90,000 online transactions since 1997 with only 4 chargebacks. They also were at CJ for 2 years. These merchants running reversals above 6%, due to bad CC information, are either unwilling to spend 20.00 per month or purposely calculate the "pain level" their affiliates are willing to endure. I have some CJ merchants, who I cringe when they sell something over 500.00. 90% of those get wacked on a regular basis.

Therefore I do not showcase the CJ merchants who show excessive reversal rates or products over 500.00. The exceptions are if they come here to ABW and face the music as they try and attract active affiliates. Time for CJ to clean house on the merchant abusers of those reversal figures.

Webmaster Mike

"Anyone can make a dollar, it is when you make sense that it starts to add up."...does your eBiz plan make sense?

I do $1000's business each month with both onlinesports and mlb selling identical products. Online sports has a reversal rate of 67% - mlb's is... are you ready? 0% (zero). Same product, same traffic base.

99% of the time the reason online sports gives is Invalid CC. It's total cr@p.

Now knowing the merchant and the products they are selling, I can see where the invalid CC may be a legitimate thing. First cigars would be at a higher risk for fraud than some other products. Also from their shipping and ordering information page:

quote:Credit cards are processed via PCAuthorize. In order to prevent credit card fraud, we do not process automated address verification. Every order is verified and shipped by our staff. If shipping and billing addresses are different, we will confirm the authenticity of the order with the cardholder, both for the cardholder's and company's protection. Any order without a valid phone number for the billing party will not be processed. Do not use toll free, cell phone or pager numbers as directory assistance is also used to validate that the billing party exists at the address specified. While shopping at Neptunecigar.com, your IP address will be monitored. Any fraudulent credit card use attempt will be notified to IFCC/FBI.

As you can see, they are not using an automatic processing, not even AVS. They probably found that AVS wasn't cutting it for the fraud protection. It isn't known as the most reliable system in the world, that's for sure. Looks like they have a problem with fraudulent charges and take more steps than most companies to protect themselves and their merchant account. It looks like the way they have it set up, anyone who places an order will get sent to the reciept page and they are capturing the order information only. So the CJ tracking would be generated. Then they manually process the orders, and any orders that don't meet their criteria get the boot.

I guess the question would be is this a consistent pattern you see with them? Is this the first time something like this has happened. I bet they get a lot of kids trying to buy cigars.

quote:>>> If <<< shipping and billing addresses are different, we will confirm the authenticity of the order with the cardholder Any order without a valid phone number for the billing party will not be processed. Do not use toll free, cell phone or pager numbers as directory assistance is also used to validate that the billing party exists at the address specified.

I bet they get a lot of kids trying to buy cigars.

Keep Your Hands Off My Cookies

this has NOTHING to do with an invalid credit card (twice)

many many people have unlisted numbers, does this mean they can not purchase??

so, they say they verify all orders, ok.
but it says that is IF the billing and the shipping do not match.
IF they are using NO AVS, then how do they even know?
The fact that they dont spend 20 bucks a month for AVS bugs me.

I don't know what the deal is with those 2 particular reversals. If that is an unusual occurrence with them, then it definitely is worth questioning the merchant about. All I was saying is that with the way their order processing is set up, I can see how a transaction could show on CJ tracking which is later reversed by them for an invalid CC, where this definitely should not be a reason (except in rare instances) for a merchant who is using real-time authorization. They are not using real-time authorization.

@papasan

Do you fully understand how credit card processing works? They did say that they do verify manually each order by their staff. Doesn't mean they listed every way in which they do this. From the whole tone of their paragraph regarding the processing of orders, it would seem that cc fraud is a major issue they have to deal with. The AVS system IS NOT a catch all for fraud, and if you do a bit of research on it and talk to merchants you will hear horror stories of it's short comings. It gives false results many times. It will issue a match when in fact there is not a match at times. The credit card holders information is not always accurate in their db and they are not the best in keeping it updated. And it doesn't match the entire address anyway. If a scammer has gotten the info off of a credit card bill, it is completely useless. They have the billing address.

As far as Neptune's statement regarding the matching of billing and shipping addresses, that is a red flag for cc fraud. Some merchants won't even ship to a different address. Visa/MC strongly encourage businesses in high risk areas to consider this as an option. Even though they don't use AVS, they still have to provide the merchant bank with this information when submitting the transaction manually. You also have to provide a phone number for the customer. Throw away phone numbers (such as pagers and cell phones) are also a red flag for fraud.

Notwithstanding what this particular merchant may or may not have done regarding the 2 reversals experienced by Amit (IOW assuming they are running their program above board), if they deal in an area high with cc fraud, the processing they are using would yield a much better chance in catching fraud. Why pay for the AVS (and it is more than $20/month since you typically get charged a per authorization fee by both the gateway and the merchant bank which can add up)when they will have to do the manual checking anyway?

All I was pointing out, is the with this particular merchant's processing set-up, I can see where there is a possibilty for invalid cc being a legitimate reason. I can also see if they find out that some 18 y/o placed the order and they can't ship it because that's illegal, then them using that reason for the reversal.

Doesn't mean that something wasn't amiss with those 2 particular reversals. The merchant should be given to opportunity to explain. If they don't then that says a lot right there.

As far as their hours and the speed of the reversal? Can't say. Don't know where these guys are based out of. Many of the tobacco companies are located offshore.